EDINBORO, PA. College town unites for stab victim's family

The dinner-dance is planned for late March.
EDINBORO, Pa. (AP) -- For the second time in almost six years, people in this small town are organizing a charity dinner-dance at the town's main banquet hall to help a family torn apart by a ghastly slaying.
In 1998, science teacher John Gillette was gunned down by a pupil at a middle-school dance.
Now it's Troy Carter, 42, a former Edinboro University football star stabbed repeatedly by his 17-year-old son, police say, in a Jan. 18 attack authorities can't explain. The attacker also wounded the teen's younger brother.
Police have said Jordan Carter heard voices telling him to take drugs and kill his family. But the real "why?" may never be known be known as Jordan Carter remains incarcerated indefinitely at Warren State Hospital while doctors try to determine if he'll ever be mentally competent to stand trial.
In the meantime, Troy Carter's widow, Wendy Jo, a supermarket worker, must raise her twin eighth-grade daughters; care for her injured son, Joshua, 15; and figure out how to survive without her husband -- a construction foreman who had no life insurance but qualified for a small pension.
Fine line
The Carters' friends and neighbors say it's difficult to balance the family's need for privacy with the efforts to raise money, goods and services.
"An incident like that is always a sensitive matter," said Sheridan Stricker, a nursing home administrator helping to organize the dinner-dance late next month. "It's overwhelming to the point of not comprehending it, unless you've lived through it.
"The reality is that's what this family needs [money]. But it's not all about the money at all. It's about the death -- and the opportunity for people to do something to help."
Stricker didn't know the Carter family well. But her son is close to Joshua and she offered to help -- she's got a background in fund-raising -- as the community's mothers commiserated in the hours after the attacks.
"The community is heartbroken," Stricker said. "Our community is still hurting from the Gillette [killing], and this will reopen a lot of those wounds."
Remembering
Edinboro, about 20 miles south of Erie, is a simple, rural town of 6,950 built around the intersection of U.S. Route 6N and state Route 99. Dotted with modest homes, whose eaves are draped with icicles this time of year, Edinboro's population more than doubles when the university is in session.
Gillette was shot by then-14-year-old Andrew Wurst on April 28, 1998, at a dance at the James W. Parker Middle School -- the same school attended by Troy Carter's twin daughters, Kristen and Katelyn -- in the General McLane School District. Andrew abandoned his initial insanity defense, pleaded guilty and is serving a 30-to 60-year prison sentence.
In Jordan Carter's case, investigators said they found marijuana hidden in a stuffed bear and writings about commanding voices when they searched the family home.
"They say if I kill my family and take lots of drugs they will leave me alone," the teen wrote, according to state police. "I have to get away from the voices and the ravens."
Assistance
When Troy Carter was killed, the community's response to Gillette's death became a template for the newer effort.
"We had another tragedy up here with a school teacher, and they did something similar for him and his family," Robert Gwinn, vice president of McCormick Construction Co. where Carter worked, explained simply. "And it seemed to work well."
Stricker, Gwinn and others hope to raise some $75,000 for the family, possibly to be held in a trust, through the dinner-dance and other efforts. A local sportsmen's group helped clean up the Carter home, aided by a local company that cleaned or replaced rugs at the grisly scene, Stricker said.
But the volunteers also are trying to tread lightly. Officials at Nick's Place, the local banquet hall that is donating its services for next month's dinner-dance, declined to comment, concerned about self-promotion and invading the privacy of the Carter family, who have uniformly refused interviews.
Checks for the "Troy Carter Fund" are being collected at a local bank, the supermarket where Wendy Carter works and her husband's former employer.
Tickets for the dinner-dance are expected to run $100 to $150 per couple.
"Holding this in the same place [as Gillette's benefit] and with the same kind of event brings the community together in tragedy and memory," Stricker said. "It's a place our community can come together and start to heal -- again."